Monomorphic

This is an attempt at restating part of this old blog post in a simpler way.

Scientists are valuable to society. They help extract new knowledge and theories about the world. To the extent that they are right, they improve our affluence, our physical health, and, possibly, our outlook on life. But scientists can also provide us with tools that support or threaten regimes, with weapons, surveillance equipment, encryption, and unexpected discoveries that bring about social change with unexpected consequences. The mass industrialisation of the western world enabled the rise of the middle class like never before, an event whose full consequences might not yet be understood.

Philosophy is traditionally defined as the study of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics and logic. Here are some reasons why scientists may want to expand their knowledge beyond the scientific realm into the philosophical one.

Metaphysics and epistemology. Scientific method originally grew out of philosophy – what we today call science was originally called natural philosophy. Scientific method is not fixed but continues to evolve, and we must continually revise what we know and how we obtain knowledge, particularly in emerging fields. Karl Popper’s famous assertion that scientific claims need to be falsifiable is only one of many recent viewpoints that have gained momentum. Thinkers such as Bruno Latour have asserted that scientific facts are socially constructed through a complex process.

Ethics and politics. New technologies may enable new kinds of interactions between people as well as new possibilities for the individual in their lives. The way that individuals interact with new knowledge and new technologies is determined by innate tendencies and desires, as well as social processes, conventional morality in the society where one lives, and political decisions. If the scientist understands these processes, they are in a position to guide their new findings into the world in an optimal way.

I omit aesthetics from this list for now since its link to science is not straightforward, and logic since it is now an inherent part of mathematics and thus also science. Where logic goes beyond mathematical/symbolic logic, it is of course also worthwhile to study it.

The scientist who also ventures into philosophy will be able to place their scientific findings within an ethical system and within an overall purpose-directed framework. The scientific process by itself mostly does not permit any consideration of these questions, and thus scientists must either submit to an existing ethical system, whether implicitly or explicitly, or create their own. To put it in very blunt terms: the scientist or engineer without an ethical system is sometimes a tool in the hands of others who do have such a system. Awareness that the choice exists can be crucial.